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In May 2020, Lyndsey Stonebridge wrote in ‘The New Statesman’:
What if instead of seeing the NHS as a frail but plucky thing that needs protecting, we thought of it instead as the table around which we all need to get to create a really different – and possibly more human – political future? What if getting back to work might also be a way of getting back to the human condition?
Stonebridge was writing as the nation was returning to work following one of the Covid-19 lockdowns. Here, there is a suggestion that we frame the NHS in more realistic terms and not as simply showing its worth in times of crisis, as happened with Covid-19, but as a functioning service with intention and purpose. In this commentary, I want to provide some examples of this intentionality in working as psychoanalytic child and adolescent psychotherapists in the NHS.
One of the arguments Stonebridge (2020) makes is that the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s distinction between ‘work’ and ‘labour’ might guide our attempts to build a better society. In relation to Norris’s outline, I am thinking about Arendt’s distinction in these ways, as conceptualised in her book ‘The Human Condition’ (Arendt, 1958). She suggests that ‘labour’ is thought of as those activities that are borne out of biological necessity, often cyclical and repetitive. ‘Work’ is more about the outcome, the world of things, perhaps linear or even goal-oriented and with the intention of achieving ends. Stonebridge (2020) stated that ‘work … gives collective meaning to what we do.’ ‘Action’ is connected to new beginnings and having a role in shaping the public sphere – a more revolutionary aim that is likely beyond the scope of this commentary but is made more possible in the way that we engage with the current system and its restrictions within the NHS.
Using this political and philosophical formulation, ‘labour’ will include those activities that denude meaning if they overtake the entirety of tasks, such as the increasing burden of docum